How Erin Andrews Coped With Cervical Cancer While Working Two Jobs and Getting Married

As a sideline reporter for FOX NFL and host of Dancing With the Stars, Erin Andrews barely had a moment to breathe, let alone get sick. But as the 39-year-old says, “cancer doesn’t care.”

After a routine gyno appointment last July, her doctor told her she needed additional testing. In September of last year—Andrews remembers the date by where it fell in the football season—she was in a meeting when her phone rang with the results. She had cervical cancer and needed surgery, stat.

She had her first operation on Tuesday, Oct. 11. Two days later came another devastating call: Not all the cancer had been removed. A few discussions and opinions later—more on that in a minute—she had a second procedure in November. All the while, she worked, keeping her illness a secret from her co-workers and her fans.

Andrews went public with her condition earlier this year. A six-month check-up right before her July wedding to Jarret Stoll came back clear, and now, she’s opening up even more about her experience. On an interview tour for White Claw, a hard seltzer company with which Andrews is currently partnering, she talked with SELF about how she managed a particularly packed life during her diagnosis and treatment.

As soon as she was able to, Andrews took her stress out on the gym.

Fitness has always been important to Andrews—she needs endurance to make it through long days on the set and field, and her intense workouts relieve stress and anxiety. Though she had to take about a week and a half off after each surgery, she went back to the gym as soon and as often as she could.

She’d knock out intervals and inclines on the treadmill or rowing machine, repeating to herself, “I’m going to beat this. I’m going to beat this.” “It was such a great release,” she says. “I was so stressed out not knowing if I’d need a second surgery, and then of course I did. But it was great for me to be like, ‘I can do this.’”

Andrews believes controlling stress now will give her the best chance of staying healthy later (note: though a recent systematic research review failed to find a link between stress and cancer recurrence, the authors noted that relieving it can boost well-being and quality of life for survivors). So now, she follows the lead of fellow celebs like Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who always block time in their travel schedules for fitness.

“I make it a priority—I say in my head I want to try to work out every single day,” she says. She might miss one here or there, but the goal of consistency keeps her on track. “It’s not something I’m doing as leisure or fun; it’s a part of my job and a part of my life.”

Andrews insisted she wouldn’t miss a single football game, and she stuck to that.

She took two days after her first procedure to “lay on the couch and do nothing,” but the Thursday after her Tuesday surgery, she boarded a red-eye from Los Angeles to Green Bay for the Packers-Cowboys game.

Andrews realizes her decision to keep working throughout treatment might seem strange to some. “Who goes in, has this surgery and then three, four days later you have to be on television and act like you're totally fine? Meanwhile, you’re cramping all over the place and having a tough time walking around.”

Some of that determination came from not wanting to look weaker than her male colleagues, she says. “That’s one of the biggest things about being a female in the industry—you don’t want to lose your step,” she says. She’d just come through a huge civil trial related to the man who surreptitiously recorded her in a hotel room—the verdict was handed down in March of 2016. The last thing she wanted was to bring more drama to the office.

But work also served as her escape, an opportunity to forget her problems and remember she was more than her diagnosis. “The audience is tuning into us for a four-hour game or they’re tuning into us for a two-hour Dancing With The Stars show,” she says. “Part of our job is to forget what’s going on in our personal lives and get out there and smile.”

Even as she maintained her hectic pace, Andrews took time in her off hours for meditation and visualization to tame her anxiety.

In hotel rooms, she’d perch in the window, soaking up sunlight. “I’d sit there with my eyes closed, imagining the white light cleansing over my body, telling my body to heal,” she says.

She wore beads made of amethyst on her wrists, and practiced deep breathing whenever she could. The techniques might not kill cancer cells, she reasoned, but they enabled her to calm down when uncertainty threatened to overwhelm her. “It was more or less just to get my head right and not feel like I was hyperventilating all the time,” she says.

Though she kept the news about her cancer from many, Andrews' close family and friends served as a rock solid support system.

That includes many girlfriends; her father, who’d survived prostate cancer; and Stoll, a former NHL player. The two weren’t even engaged when she got diagnosed, and the experience brought them closer, she says.

Stoll accompanied her to the hospital for her first procedure where, coincidentally, a good friend of Andrews’ had just given birth. “They were three floors down—so we went down and saw the baby, kissed the baby, kind of rubbed the baby’s head for good luck,” she says. “Then we walked upstairs and I had the surgery.”

Cancer’s no joke—but Andrews smiled when she could.

After surgery, she and Stoll went back down to see her friend again. “The baby was wearing a diaper, my girlfriend was wearing a diaper, and I was wearing a diaper,” Andrews says, laughing. “I was saying to Jarret, ‘Babe, you’re the only one not wearing a diaper.”

When her girlfriends came over to visit afterward, they’d chuckle over the various indignities of recovery. “Wearing 18-hour protection pads with wings, trying to fit that into Spanx when you’re doing Dancing with the Stars—well, there’s nothing hilarious about it, but it kind of is hilarious,” she says. “You have to have those moments.”

Humor also got her through the tension of her most recent follow-up appointment. She decided she could go it alone—until she got to the waiting room and felt like she was going to pass out. “I just called my sister and I was like, ‘Let’s go over funny lines from Ferris Bueller or Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles—I can’t take this!” she says.

Finally, they called her name and the doc gave her the good news: She was still in the clear. Her next follow-up is in six months. This time, she’ll bring someone with her. “It’s too hard to do it by yourself,” she says.

If Andrews has one key piece of advice for women facing cancer or another tough medical situation, it’s this: Take control of your health care and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

After her first surgery failed to remove all the cancer, her doctor told her she’d need a hysterectomy. But she didn’t want to lose her fertility unless she had to—so she kept searching for an oncologist who understood her situation and gave her honest answers and a less drastic option. “Do what you can do that’s best for you”—timing and insurance might somewhat limit your options for doctors and treatments—“but you can never have too many opinions,” she says.

In her quest, she asked other medical professionals for recommendations. Eventually, she found an oncologist she clicked with—he told her, “‘I’m going to give you the best possible advice before we take out your reproductive organs,’” she says. Before she scheduled the surgery, she checked in one more time with the physician who’d referred her. “I said, why would you choose him?” she says. “He said: ‘Because if my wife was sick, I’d tell her to go to him. That’s all I needed to hear.’”